Beware the Ides of March, and the other 30 days of it as well

If you are a dedicated reader of The Enfranchised, and you aren't, then you'd know we had it out over the topic of NCAA basketball once before (though my post is the only one in the series worth reading). Still, there might be a dribble or two of piss left for the taking.

I'll first note that I am of two minds about college basketball. On the one hand, I am bothered by the entire phenomenon. Part of this is personal--after four of my roommates were evicted from our choice F Street townhouse during my sophomore year at GWU, I was shipped off to an "efficiency" (one could write an entire post about the misnomic properties of this appellation) apartment in the very same dormitory that housed our illustrious Men's basketball team: The GWU Fighting Colonials. I quickly found them to be loud (quiet hours don't apply when nobody on the floor studies), spoilt (they all seemed to drive SUVs and imports when most others walked, and to have Playstation N's in their rooms when few others had even Playstation N-1's), and lecherous (it quickly became a tedium to have to break the news to them that my girlfriend was just that. The poor girl is Latin and voluptuous (not in the euphemistic way) and so attracts more black men than the subject of a hypothetical stereotype that won't get me in trouble with the NAACP).

On the other hand, when those selfsame Colonials fought their way into the top 20, and then the top 10, I became something of a born-again bandwagoner. I was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Colonial Army, and thought it the personal duty of every student and faculty at GW to make sure these boys had all the Powerade, pep, and pussy they needed to assure a good seed in the Tourney. But when starting Center Pops Mensah-Bonsu [sic] and company failed to lead the team into the sweet 16, I was crestfallen. They hadn’t even lost to some distinguished team like Oxford or The University of Chicago, but rather to a regional school in some North Carolina backwater (Earl University, maybe, it was Marquis or Baron U. It bore the name of some viceroy, of that much I’m sure).

So I did what any good sports fan would do if once-disappointed by his hometown heroes – I formed summary judgments about the intrinsic worth of the entire enterprise. So why worry at all about the mechanics of the tournament? Why not forget basketball altogether and have the respective team-members see who can construct a vaguer and more ridiculous major (Rural Sociology, anyone?) to appease those nettlesome academic-types who are always interfering with university athletics? I’m fairly sure GW could still compete at that.

That, or eliminate the automatic Ivy bid, distribute automatic bids by regions instead of conferences, recalibrate the S-Curve accordingly, and publicly clarify the role of Ratings Percentage Index.

Either way.

Pissing In The Wind: This Bracket Racket

This Sunday, the NCAA announces its field of 65.

That is, of course, an odd number. And as much as it isn't even, it's even less a power of 2, as tournament rosters are wont to be. This irregularity descends from a historical quirk. In every tournament, there are the 31 automatic bids and the 34 at-large bids.

The automatic bids go to the winners of the separate conferences. There used to be 30 conferences, but the august Mountain West Conference split from the athletic pantheon of the Western Athletic Conference, and in its infinite wisdom the NCAA decided both were, in fact, real conferences and both deserve automatic bids.

And then there are the at-large bids, or, as they're also known, the "Good Teams". You want to see Duke in the tournament? Of course you do, cause Coach K is K-k-k-krazy! And who wouldn't want to see UNC. Or Maryland. Or Boston College. Let's not forget Wake Forest's Demon Deacons, a team name up there with Pennsylvania's Fighting Quakers for absurdity. Of course, because all these teams come from the ACC, most of these great teams are coming from an at-large bid.

So why even bother with the automatic bids that are just warm-up for the teams that have been spending the regular seasons kicking ass and taking names?

And while we're at it, what is the deal with those conference tournaments at all? Let's say there is a team from the Podunk Regional Conference that is good. Not great, certainly not a top 25 team, though maybe it's gotten some votes. They work their ass off to establish a solid record, get to the Charles Willamon (he was the first athletic director at East Bumblefuck University) Tournament, and lo and behold, there are actually cameras there! They're going to be on TV! And they lose! And even though they're obviously the "best" team in the 'Dunk.

This is all done, of course, because those fancy-shmancy TV cameras give the 'Dunk teams hell of money. At the cost of, y'know, screwing over their best child.

So, dear commentatrices, what's the way to deal with basketball championships?

Star Wars, Episode Crap: when Luke met Powder

I have an odd habit of not seeing movies everyone else sees. Among the gaps in my pop culture memory are: The Lord of the Rings series, any of the Harry Potterses, Spaceballs, Dirty Dancing, non-pornographic Julia Roberts Films, and Star Wars Episode II (although I have seen Tron several times). The reason I never saw Star Wars Episode II is because I saw Star Wars Episode I, and Episode I sucked and swallowed. It was right down there with my other basement dwellers: Magnolia, I Heart Huckabees, Go, The Land Before Time II,V-VII, and of course, Powder.

(editor's note: Those who know me have been made aware of my rabid anti-Powder agenda for quite some time, but for those who haven't been blessed with my ravings, Powder is about an albino who has electro-magnetic powers. At some point you see his ass, and at the end he runs into a field and storm clouds take him away. I kid you not. This is the storyline. Check here if you don't believe me).

Granted, I'm not much of a Star Wars fan anyway. I remember that Darth Vader was Luke's dad, Princess Leia his girlfriend, and Harrison Ford his bitch, and that's pretty much it. But I went to see Episode I with my Star Wars enthusiast friends and hated it. Mostly this was because I had my first encounter with The Great Satan--Jaarjar Binx--plus I had waaaay too many Sour Patch kids and they made my tongue hurt for days. So when Episode II came out I passed, and when Episode III was released I passed gas, then passed on the movie (then passed gas again, out of spite).

So as you can see, I'm in no position to offer any sort of critique or analysis of George Lucas' latest bamboozlement of the Sith-fearing American public. You'll have to read Foster's insightful and hilarious post for that. What I offer, instead, is a voyage into the unknown--a fantastic, magical journey into the world of "What If?": what if two of the crappiest movies ever made combines forces to make a third, crappy movie. Ladels and jellyspoons, I give to you, a sneak peak at an exclusive Leviathan production, When Luke Met Powder:

Powder: Hi, I'm Powder.
Luke: Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you?
P: What?
L: What? WHAT?! Why the hell are you so pale?
P: Oh, that. I'm an albino. I have no pigment in my skin.
L: It looks like you fell into a vat of flour or something.
P: No, not Flour, Powder.
L: Fucking A, are you deaf too? I said it looks like you fell into a vat of flour. Wow, deaf, pale, and stupid. Move over Hellen Keller, we have a new winner!
P: I like your sword.
L: It's not a sword, it's a light saber, dumbass. I got it for my birthday.
P: Cool, can I try it?
L: And get your greasy, pale hands all over it? Think again, cracker.
(enter George Lucas) George Lucas: Hi, I'm George Lucas. What are your names?
L: I'm Luke. (gesturing to Powder) This is my giant pet hampster, Whitey.
P: I'm powder. I'm an albino.
G: Wow, an albino! I should make a movie about you!
P: You make movies?
G: I sure do, Luke here was in three of mine.
L: ...and he's been just brimming with ideas since then.
G: Well I have an idea now.
L: What, the albino thing?
G: Yeah, isn't it great?
L: Who the hell is gonna pay to see a movie about some sun-tan-reject?
G: Hmm, you're right. Nobody would possibly pay money to see that.
L: I'd pay money not to see it.
P: Guys, I'm right here.
L: Are you still here? Why don't you go play hide-and-seek in the snow over there.
P: Oooh! Can I seek?
L: Sure, go take a look now. There's a polar bear blinking hiding somewhere in that snowdrift.
P: You guys are my best friends.
(scene)



(Same post, different blog)

The Man Who Sold the World (Or Star Wars Episode III: The Empire Strikes Out)

In the weeks now since Star Wars Episode III was released, the invectives leveled against its progenitor, George Lucas, have reached proportions more epic than anything that’s come out of the brain trust at Skywalker Ranch. The British daily The Guardian called Lucas less a director and more a “chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option,” whose corporate avatar, Industrial Light and Magic, contains “no magic, little light [and] an awful lot of heavy industry.” An ‘alt’ American paper, The Observer, suggested assessing films of negative aesthetic merit in terms of “Lucases” - as in, ‘Dude, Where’s my Car? got three Lucases in the Chicago Tribune’. The Salon review, marked by its usual sass, was entitled “Same old Sith” and the film summarized as the work of “an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe”. But perhaps it was the dreaded New Yorker (which, it should be noted in fairness, is responsible for more conversions to the Dark Side than Palpatine ever was) who went furthest in criticism qua witticism. Anthony Lane calls the Bard of Endor a “rootless soul” with “a near fascistic rage for order” who has created:

“an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.”

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most critics with a failed-novel on their shoulders and a circulation of over 10,000 are prone to the occasional hyperbolic judgment. But rarely is such lavish and luxuriant venom heaped upon a film that makes no pretensions to Oscar-worthiness. Surely, this literary-lashing, this critical-cornholing, can’t be warranted, not by Our Man George. Can it?

The short answer, children, is yes. Yes it can.

Star Wars Episode III sucked. It sucked essentially - sucked at the root of its very being, and sucked by and large because of an obscenely wealthy, beard-and-pompadour-sporting pestilence known as George Locust - er - Lucas. Lucas, then, is worthy of revile. Still, I won’t offer much of a critique of the film itself - that has been done, with all the subtlety and restraint of a blowjob from a vacuum cleaner. Besides, I actually hold certain of its elements beyond reproach; protected, as it were, from a death of suckitude stretched indefinitely in space and time at the event-horizon of suckiness that is this Lucasian suckfest of a Black-Hole-suck-suck.

Yoda, for one. Yoda can do no wrong for me, not since he watched Luke’s X-wing lift-off from Degoba, squinting sagely and replying to Obi-Wan’s portentous claim that “that boy is our only hope” with “No, there is another.” Anthony Lane is so perturbed by our little-green-friend’s cadence that he begs us to “break [him] a fucking give”. True, Yoda’s inversions may be contrived and irrelevant, but they are fucking YODA’s inversions. Besides, Lane’s review shares column space with New Yorker cartoons. He should know all about contrived and irrelevant.

Two. Natalie Portman. The poor girl is as beautiful as she is useless in this role. I mean, we know she can act. Just look at her wonderful performance as the Madonna-Whore in Closer; and her in some ways even more impressive turn as the Atlas to Zack Braff’s globular ego in Garden State. The problem is that Herr Lucas writes romance like he would a car stereo installation manual, and he has forcefully ejaculated such unspeakable tripe past the lips of Amidala that - could I prove paternity - I would bring him up on charges of rape.

Needless to say, most if not everything else in the movie sucks. Or if it doesn’t itself suck, it is so bathed in Lucas’s putridity that one can’t stand in its presence for long before one’s stomach turns and one’s eyes water.

Still, Lucas’s real crime has nothing to do with the film itself, but rather its audience. I saw Revenge of the Sith a week after opening, at a 10PM showing in Oxford (a highly disreputable time to see a movie in England) and the house was packed. A line had formed outside the small theatre 45 minutes before the 45 minutes of commercials before the 45 minutes of trailers before the movie. When John Williams’ anthem and STAR WARS finally leapt to screen, a great applause went up: the sound of an anxious hope that an under-the-desk hand job - begun in 1977 in the spirit of innocence and exploration and gas shortage - was finally to reach its climax after seven-odd years of cinematic blue-balls. When it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t to be, we ragtag band of geeks, dorks and dungeon-masters turned to the one weapon losers have wielded since time immemorial in the face of romantic (Romantic?) jilting: self-important, sneering mockery.

In short, we laughed. And we laughed not just at 3PO’s obliviousness or R2’s irascibility, not just at Palpatine’s coiffure or Mace Windu’s purple light saber; nor even did we draw the line at snickering over Hayden Christensen’s bitchy rejoinder to Ewan MacGregor’s warning of the Sith lords’ evil (“Not from my point of view! From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”). No, friends, I am sad to say that we laughed at the Man in Black himself. When Vader, freshly be-suited and strapped into a Kafkaesque device of wrought steel, is deceived by the Emperor into believing that he has killed the woman he loves, he tears free of his restraints, shakes two black-gloved fists in the air and vociferates the kind of “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that can only issue from the darker regions of James Earl Jones’ soul.

And we chortled with all the righteous irony of Janine Garafalo at a straight bar. We laughed at Darth-motherfucking-Vader. And why? Because some dude in this dumb ass movie was totally ripping off Star Wars, and didn’t he realize how fucking kitsch that was?

In the short time it took Luke and Lea to be born, something distinctively American died. That bright-eyed, naïve earnestness; that seriousness about kidding ourselves; that starving for a mythos which was as fun and facile as it was sacred and indispensable. In a word, that unselfconsciousness. That - can I even say it without you cringing in this age of I Love the 80s and Best Week Ever?…..that innocence.

Somewhere in the vast conceptual gulf between the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars became what Jean Baudrillard (known in some circles simply as ‘French Theorist #163’) calls a simulacrum - a cultural copy of a copy whose original has long since gone the way of the sitcom. Worse yet, it became a simulacrum of itself. A kind of hyper-movie (or hyper-franchise) whose logic and aesthetics we had already chewed up, spoofed, and spit out into the dust bin of irony-for-its-own-sake. In short, even if the prequels had sucked half as much as they actually did, they were destined to be subjected to the bored and disaffected nihilism of an X-generation of maladroit malcontents who wear bowling shirts with other people’s names on them. In the greatest cultural perversion in recent history, Star Wars has become Space Balls. And Space Balls - if you ask the average video store clerk worth his salt in vapid cynicism - has become Citizen Cane.

None of this, of course, is to exonerate Herr Lucas, whose Leviathan ILM was practically at the helm of Hollywood’s perfection of the vacuous summer blockbuster. But if you ask me, his soul is cleaner than yours or mine. After all, he’s got your ten bucks, and he carries it with a perfectly straight face all the way to the bank. You and I, on the other hand, are left in this Recycled Land of Thin-Candy-Shelled Men, wondering why it is we can’t help but smirk every time we hear the name “Grand Moff Tarkin”.

Pissing in the Wind: Food Rainbow

I know that Dan & Dan will probably poo-poo the government's newly designed Food Rainbow, but let me be the first to say that I think this is the greatest idea ever. That's right, EVER. I mean, this makes Dewey Decimal look like a retard.

Consider the old system. You have different food "groups" like meats, vegetables, dairy, etc., with the most important group forming the bottom, or "base," of the pyramid. But here's the tricky part: the pyramid if full of words. Words spelled out with letters. Letters, for God's sake! Excuse me, Food & Drug Administration, but I didn't come hear to pass a reading test, I came her to eat, dammit!

Herein lies the genius of the new system. Drawing on the success of the Homeland Security threat system, the new food pyramid uses colors. Accessible, easy to understand, colors. Eating is no longer just for the English-speaking, literate Americans ( i.e. liberals and their activist/homosexual judges), it's for everyone. This is democracy at its finest.

Q: "But what if I'm blind and I can't see anything, how am I supposed to know what to eat?"

A: "You'll eat whatever the hell I put in your cage, dammit."

Some critics charge that the new system is more "confusing" or "difficult" than the old system. Some critics also have "shit for brains." But I digress. Under the old system, if you wanted to know what food group a food was in--for example, yogurt--you needed to think. You needed to think about whether yogurt came from a cow (dairy group), whether it had seeds (fruit group), or whether it was spore-based (meats & vegetable group). But with beautiful new (techni)color system, you need only associate a food with a color.

Take a look at the new rainbow pyramid. Orange stands for grains, Green stands for vegetables, Red for fruits, Yellow for oils, Light Blue/teal for dairy, and Indigo for meats & beans. So what color is yogurt? If it's plain yogurt, it's white. That color isn't in the food pyramid, so you shouldn't eat it. If it's flavored yogurt, say, blueberry, it's probably some sort of a bluish-purple. If it's more blue than purple, it's in the Dairy group, and if it's a darkish purple, it's in the Meats & Beans group. Then I want you to ask yourself: do you really want to eat a Meat & Beans yogurt? I didn't think so. Find a different colored yogurt and start again.

"Wow, the new rainbow pyramid is so easy to use, why didn't they think of that in the first place?"

Good question. When the original monochrome food pyramid was released in 1992, the world was a different place. Buffalos roamed free throughout the Midwest, presidents were free to engage in acts of extra-marital fellatio, and a little thing called "focus groups" had yet to be invented. As noted in the official Mypyramid.gov website:

As part of the design and development process, potential images and messages were tested with consumers to determine how well they communicated the intended content and how appealing they were to consumers. The results from the consumer research were used to revise and finalize the consumer materials so that consumers can more easily understand these messages and incorporate them into their lifestyle.

In other words, pretty colors test well. Hence the updated and more scientific color pyramid.

"But wait? With the old food pyramid, I knew the group at the bottom was more important than the group up top. With the new system, how do I tell what group is most important? This rainbow has no bottom. For the love of God this rainbow has no bottom!"

First off, I'm not going to answer your question unless you put some pants on. Secondly, the new pyramid doesn't even need a bottom. The bigger the sliver of color, the more important. See the picture below for details:

"OK, I see the Yellow group is the smallest, and the Indigo one looks a bit smaller than the Red. But I think the Green and teal are about the same size. Why not do some other design like a graph or pie chart?"

Another good question, but the good folks at MyPyramid are one step ahead of you. As they note, "Several designs were tested. Pyramid-shaped designs, Pyramid-like designs and non-Pyramid designs were all tested with consumers."

You see that part about "non-Pyramid designs," smart-ass. They tested it and it failed. Failed miserably, in fact. When the non-pyramid design was tested on the focus group, they were so confused they were eating 20 serving of cottage cheese a day, and drinking a glass of marinara sauce with each meal.

"OK, you've convinced me that the new color-based pyramid is more efficient than the old one, and it seems like even a Swede could understand the new version. But what about that man climbing the stairs in that picture? Is that supposed to symbolize something?"

Actually, no. He's just lost.

(Same post, different blog)

Pissing In The Wind: Shape of the Shapely

In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. Food was provided for you, heck! The mutton was right next to the... lion... meat. Where else could you turn one picked-clean rib into two sides of meat (with a nice rack). Take that Olive Garden, you're no restaurant compared to the Eden Garden! But that same piece of fruit that gave us the Original Sin of Knowledge gave us both Shame and Vanity. We've all seen the drawings of Eve covering herself with shrubbery when she realizes for the first time ever nudity's incorrectness. The part of the story they don't tell you is that the first thing she said after that was, "Does this fig leaf make me look fat?"

Soon afterwards, brothers became murderers, extra people conveniently popped up, so-and-so begat a-lot-of-effing-people, and hunters became gatherers. We ate whatever we could catch/steal from the hyenae. In the words of an NPR story about what we found in the dried-up shitters of Vikings, they ate "meat, beer, and more meet." Or maybe it was the other way around.

But during the 1950's, everything became standardized. Students across the country learned to be vaporized in the same under-desk crouch. Across the country you could get the same sub-standard beef (hopefully it's beef) at Kroc's McDonald's, and we could live in the same houses on identical cul-de-sacs as the Cookie Cutter made its first appearance as a tool of the architect. The food square showed us that we needed to get different types of food. Three-thousand calories from those delectable apple pie concoctions that have never been near either an apple nor a pie from the Golden Arches does not a balanced diet make.

But that wasn't quite precise enough. And in the 90's we wanted to be exact. Title IX funding had to be even to a percent. Affirmative Action soared, and though school bussing firms went bankrupt, the formerly destitute specialists in impeaching presidents returned to the African American ("back in the black"). Thus the food pyramid. Everyone of the age 16-24 in this fine Republic learned it. For approximately 15 seconds. Before summarizing the information as, if society's is any indication, "Yes, I'd love you to supersize that."

All this was enough propaganda about common sense. But no. The pyramid was a familiar object, constructed of successively smaller blocks. Instead, let's instill in our children a fear of geometry by releasing this absurd assortment of amalgamated frightfully-Angled three-sided monstrosities. What? I mean, what? No, seriously, what the hell? Is this the only way that Americans under the Bush Administration can digest information? Can we not add? Were percent RDA's not enough? Commentators, tell me, what USA Today-worthy graphic describes your diet?

The Sport of Geeks

Pope/Schiavo Watch 2K5: 1 down, 1 to go.

But on to the important stuff: flaunting wealth. Of course, it used to mean something to play polo. You needed steeds, a line-up of them. No mere laborer could have enough thoroughbreds, and even if he did, they'd all be tired from tilling the soil. Till-soilers. But then horses became cheap (and eventually glue/dog food). And courtesy extended so that you didn't even need to have enough to travel. Collegiate polo expanded. Of course, because of Title IX, you had to use mares. Which ins't as bad as my school's fox-hunting team, which is legally required to be half bitches.

But now we, the Enfranchised, have reclaimed this once crown jewel of superiority and elitism, and done so in a way that warms my white, electronics-oriented heart: Segway polo. Yep. Just what you think it would be. The panacea to problems of urban congestion becoming a trusty mount. For a game that none of these people would play were it not for their having dropped 5 g-spots on this scooter.

Future, we have arrived.



Oh, and also, pointless scandal du jour. (Headline: Ms. Wheelchair stripped of title for standing)

PITW: Bread and Circuses

Pardon me if I stray from my role as moderator to smack some sense into my "peers."

To Foster: It's not that I have any strong desire for the hub-bub of professional sports to overtake the college arena. Once money is explicitly on the table, any pretense of tradition or themes or association would be lost. In their quest for players, schools would have to negotiate on cold dollars instead of warm fantasies of being say "Lady Vols" or "Demon Deacons". (Why any athlete would want to be part of these to begin with is beyond me). In a land of recruiting with contracts and bonuses instead of below-table bling would we ever find a team that could, on sheer will of consistency, compete with the Filibusters' record for single season overtimes? No. No we could not. (To those of you who take my word as gospel: don't try breaking that fact out as canon. In fact, there is no team the Filibusters. But as I write this, I realize that they sound much more like an Asian Archipelago Demoltion Unit than they do an obscure procedural trick anthropomorphized).

To 'Athan: As I was at the NCAA tournament in Kansas City (which is in Missouri. WTF? That's the kind of ill logic that belongs in Canada. Then again, so does the entire Midwest), I found the girl for you. Knowing your fetish for all things absurd and blonde, I present to you the future Mrs. PoopShit. This 6-4 mountain of a matron could make a quaker out of a presbyterian. During foul shots, we chanted "Fee Fie Fo Fum" in between the sound of her mammoth feet leaving potholes in the court. As she palmed the pig skin (I'm not confusing basketball and football her, she just brought pork rinds with her), she would engage in defense by using her gravitational influence to shape the arc of an opponent's shot, removing any hope of goal-tending calls by warping time, space, and the vision of the refs as she deftly weaved her body using calves that had as much thrust as a Pratt & Whitney 350FG Turbofan.

I mean, shit.

Would you like Freedom Fries with that?

Contrary to Foster and his distaste for collegiate basketball (and penchant for JV field hockey), I'm a big fan of this topic. Unlike our recent ones, it doesn't involve eulogizing some dead white dude who used words to big for me to understand (like eulogy), or this so-called "science" or "computers" of which I've heard so much about. Finally, a topic that every freedom loving, God and immigrant-fearing American can relate to: sports. (Need I bring up the suspicious fact that when this topic was presented, Foster conveniently fled to France, possibly to molest unwitting, underage croissants...).

Anyway, Foster makes a number of points, most of them sexually perverse. We've heard them all before: athletes are stupid; they're corrupt ingrates; women have no place driving cars; and so forth. Needless to say, I disagree with most of what Foster says, particularly the part about kicking puppies for sport.

First off, are student-athletes the hyphenated beings they're made out to be? Foster thinks not, and I think so. Sure you get the occasional Jim Harrick "Coaching 101" exam that asks Varsity Basketball players on the final exam, "How many points is a 3-pointer worth?" (find the link yourself, dammit), but I'm not willing to make the blanket statement that all athletes are like that. For every Maurice Clarrett, you have a Shane Battier or Emeka Okafur, not to mention the walk-ons. I'm not naive enough to say that Allen Iverson took the most academically strenuous courseload at Georgetown, but if you change the schools from Georgetown or Stanford to Miami or Ohio St., how much more work do you think Joe Fraternity did there than The Answer at G'Town? And note, elephant-walking doesn't count as a class (if you don't know what it is, you're missing out on a good joke).

Even at the elite universities with good athletics, you'd need to extend the anti-athlete argument to all those legacy kids whose names include suffixes with numbers. I wouldn't be particularly against this extension of the argument, but you have to remember why this is done in the first place: bling.

For every generation of Winthrops or Cabots or Bush's you let into your college, you raise the chance of getting a new building erected (heh) as that trust fund amasses. Sure it runs contrary to the ideals our nation was founded upon, but colleges gotta feed their babies too. To make a rambling point short: hate the game, not the player.

Aside from the above "logical" arguments, I'd say schools gain from admitting "underqualified" athletes in non-financial ways as well. As I've theorized before, smart kids are ugly, so athletes are hot. I don't know how I could have gotten through 2 hours of psychology if not for ogling the shotputting ogre in front of me every Monday and Wed. "Damn! Look at those traps! I wonder how much she benches... I wonder how much she can drink... I wonder what her hair smells like... I wonder what her back hair smells like..." Mmmmm. Sweet memories.

Aside from the general deliciousness athletes bring to campus, I don't see how you can be against someone doing you such a big (and sweaty) favor on the curve. Lord knows I don't want to always be that lone dot all the way to the left of the peak. If letting in a few more fullbacks brings me a standard deviation closer to the mean, I say come on in.

This is all without even bringing up the school spirit argument. I've said it once and I'll say it again: you can't tailgate for a chess match. Nor can you paint your chest for a concerto, or vomit in the bleachers during Hamlet.

I really can't think of anything else to say, so let me end this with a joke:

Q: What do you call a man with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art.

(Same post, different blog)

Unbunch your panties

Normally I try to be good about responding to PITWs, but unfortunately I've spent the weekend hacking up a lung and stealing my 3-year old cousin's jelly beans at my Aunt's house. Needless to say, my mind is currently backed up with mucus and chocolate, and all I can think about is tonight's pending Desperate Housewives and going to bed soon thereafter.

So I promise to respond tomorrow. And the response will be bigger than Jesus.

March-Madness's Arch-Badness

If the play on words in the title of this piece hangs together about as well as the diorama in Dan's seventh grade science project, cut me some slack: I'm on vacation. Or practically--I'm leaving for Frohnce and, eventually, Spain, in two motherfucking hours. And as sexy as the idea of typing this post on the Chunnel Train (Ethan Hunt style) is, I can't quite bring myself to take my laptop into a country which has already displayed great gusto for bending me over and giving me the old blitzkreig right up my Maginot Line.

Frogs aside, I'm not crazy about the flavor of this week's piss. It has a decent bouquet, fine mouthfeel, but the uric acid marches all over the fruit; the subtle notes of ginger, lemongrass, and nitrogenous waste materials are lost. What I mean to say is, its a non-question for DR. F; another pseudo-problem summarily dispatched by the finest intellect of the 21st century.

The thing about Dan's question is it breaks the FIRST rule of denial: You can't have your delusion and eat it too. Viz., as soon as we start talking about college basketball players as deserving some sort of compensation (that is, as soon as we recognize that basketball players are profitable for universities) the mirage that many of them have any right to BE at a university disappears like the Leviathan's wedding band at a nursing home (think about it). Come on, the reason college athletes are unpaid is so we who sit on the Board of Trustees (and we here at the Enfranchised sit on ALL boards-of-trustees) can keep our fingers wedged firmly in our ears and tell ourselves they're students first. But the truth is most of these kids aren't even students EIGHTH. They're ball-players, and that's a fine thing. Nothing wrong with being a ball player. (Hell, if I had a jumpshot do you think I'd be writing drivel for this rag?) Still, I've got a sneaking suspicion that Allen Iverson didn't catch all the subtleties of G. John Ikenberry's seminar's on American power while he was at Georgetown. 'Na mean?

Now, as soon as we start throwing around big, Marxy sounding words like "Labor" and "Proletariot", and wondering whether these athletes--who bring in big bucks for their schools--should get paid, why then the NCAA's New Clothes start to look an awful lot like their Birthday Suit (Look people, I can't make all the connections for you, I'm on a clock here). In other words, even asking that question should make Duke and UNC blush. The short answer, then, is that if college ballers want to get paid, they shouldn't be college ballers. What about the nearly-dead white men at the universities that profit from these amateurs? Well, that ain't right either. And just because it shows no signs of changing doesn't mean we should compound it with a further slutting-up of the NCAA. As it stands, the system works a lot like Reno, lets not make it Vegas.

Let me be the 1,242,569,382nd to say that the NBA ought to consider a farm system for developing young talent to take the place of college ball. As I'm sure that my reputation for humility precedes me, I'll humbly suggest that college athletes stay paid in the same old currency they've ALWAYS been paid in: soft grades and high-quality trim. It isn't exactly a hard-knock life for your average college jock. I had the distinction of living amongst them at a dorm RESERVED for their likes at GWU last year. Most were adequately blinged and drove sports cars, and GW didn't even make it into the sweet sixteen.

Though, I can confirm that our power forward made it into some sweet sixteens on his own...and a few baht mitzvahs.

-The Natural

Not bad for 25 minutes eh?

Pissing In The Wind: March Madness

Well, my bracket's shot. The Leviathan's, imbued with the results of hours of careful study, bears about as much resemblance to reality as, well, The Leviathan. Foster replaced basketball teams with philosophers on his, and unless Sartre makes it to the Final Four, he's fucked. So, we need something else with which to amuse ourself. Hence, pissing.

So, let's keep it simple: Why should NCAA student-athletes be amateur? Is this jsut another excuse to exploit the wage-labor of a teenaged proletariat? Or is it a genuine attempt to make them love the sport and the program?

Do your worst.

Pissing In The Wind: What America's next sport will not be.

Pardon me for the tardiness: My back is currently burdened by monsters of network protocols. That being said, Foster and the Leviathan urinated amply. I guess what I have to add is largely a prediction of what will not become popular. Ever. And that's webcomics. No, I mean, they might have their appeal in reading them. Occassionally. when you want to feel superior. But I mean watching them being written. And yet, this seems to be the newest league (cf. here). To add to the Leviathan's point: something is definitely not a sport if your jersey is ironic merchandise.

That is all,
DaBentley

Pissing in the Wind: Oh, Canada

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H - E - Double-Hockey-Stick (and a Handbasket)

Hockey, much like MxPx, is slowly going the way of the buffalo. I for one don't weep. As a portly young lad, I learned quickly that ice is a fickle mistress and something to be avoided at all costs. Though I did, for a time, feel a certain affinity toward Zambonis, as I thought they were a kind of Italian pastry.

But that, I suppose, is besides the point.

For those of you who worry about this kind of thing, and I have serious doubts that our readership includes many of you, I'll offer a suggestion or two about the prospects for filling those modestly-sized skates.

If our aim is to stick as closely to the spirit of hockey as possible, then it seems to me we ought to replace it with a sport I've tentatively called "kicking-the-shit-out-of-mulleted-Canadians". Its rules, I take it, are self-explanatory. Its potential, enormous. It'd no doubt be the biggest thing in Yank-on-Canuck action since the Aroostock War.

Alas, our legal department tells us that's not the way to go. So what else? Well, I care a great deal for backgammon. Unfortunately the WBA would murder us on the television-rights. But speaking of games which don't require a speck of athletic ability, what about poker? Seems nowadays every teenaged prick with a piggy bank and the rough capacity for abstract thought fancies himself a cardshark (here's where I tell you I was so ahead of the curve on this whole poker thing: I was so ahead of the curve on this whole poker thing).

Now, I happen to get a kick out of watching the ESPN coverage of the World Series, and apparently, so does every asshole with a remote control and optical nerves. The good news is these same kids pay me off when I'm at the casino, cuz they get it into their heads that they ought to try everything they see on TV (these are the same fuck-o's who shave each others asses and skateboard of their roofs; think "Jackass" without the production values). Now I'm not saying I'm a great player, but I respect the game enough to know my role, unlike every assclown with a dollar and a modicum of hand-eye coordination. I was at a low-limit hold-em table the other day and I'll be a tipsy-showgirl if there wasn't some little shit with a "NO LIMIT TEXAS HOLD-EM" t-shirt on. Now, I've seen a lot of great ball players at Yankee Stadium, and wouldn't you know it that not a ONE of them wore a shirt that said "PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL" on it. Anyway, bottom line is that the bubble has got to burst on the poker fad. Its only a matter of time before every fuckface with a pair of 3s and an opposable thumb gets tired of subsidizing the careers of middle-of-the-road players like myself. And once they realize they can't DO it, I'm thinking their interest in WATCHING it will wane.

Here in the Her Majesty's United Kingdom, they've got cricket. But let's get back to our discussion of sports. We've got to keep our audience in mind: what would satiate the hockey fan's puck-cravings in the absence of his fix? What's essential to hockey's hockeyness? Is it the rule structure? Dubious. Nary a Bruins fan will make the trek to his local middle school field hockey match to watch the girls duke it out in plaid, and any one who DOES is probably required by state law to inform you of certain things. Is it the ice, then? Unlikely. Few Philiadelphia Flyers fanatics shed a tear when Michelle Kwan took her last figure eight around the rink. But, come to think of it, they all probably got their rocks off watching the Tanya Harding take a lead pipe to the Kerigan's kneecap. Which brings me back to my original point: Hockey is about hurting people, preferably uneducated foreigners.

And thanks to Adam Smith and the Amazing Technicolor (R) Free Market, we've already got a substitute good which offers just as much xenophobic sadism, one that's waiting to sweep in and pick up the hockey fans once the NHL finally folds:

War.

That's right, I'm talking America's passtime. No, no. Not the Bud Selig one, the Donny Rumsfeld one. Hell, as far as I'm concerned, peace is what made sport necessary. Don't try to deny it--you know the pessimistic anthropologist in you agrees with me. But there's certainly no shortage of the stuff these days, so who needs hockey? I challenge the NHL to produce something as awe-inspiring and entertaining as the M1A2 Abrams tank, with its smoothbore kinetic shitstorm of a main gun. Step right up and get your tickets, war's got everything you could possibly ask for in a sport: high stakes, favorites and underdogs, zealous fans, controversey, live broadcasts, no slaughter rule.

Pfft. And you voted for Kerry?

Pissing In The Wind: What kinds of sticks, what kinds of balls?

So, hockey's over. I mean, yes, for the season. But, let's face it, hockey was barely holding on as the "fourth sport" anyway. If they do come back, it's not going to be because of puck-handling, it's going to be because they amend the rules so every goalie is now a gorilla without further equipment and you're allowed to engage in fights on the ice. With katanas. Katanae?

So, commentators, I put it to you: what sport will emerge from the icy ashes of the NHL's corpse to grab mindshare among American audiences? Ice skating? Tonsil Hockey? Steroid-testing? Inform us, O Enfranchised.

Pissing Into The Wind

Pardon my tardiness: I decided to take a last-minute jaunt to New York City. My hotel and office are both in Times Square. I mention this neither to brag nor to elicit your pity. Instead, it has informed my opinion: we ain't done nothin' yet.

New York is the kind of city that hands immigrants a dream, an Anglicized last name, and then starts selling you things.

Every side of any building is covered in billboards. You only know you've truly entered Times Square when the neon goes from bright to blinding. The strippers here wear pasties and g-strings not because of any sense of decency but because those particular pieces of fabric have the most impressions (read: eyeballs) to offer.

No, so long as we're merely exhuming corpses and not spray-painting them with our messages, I think we'll be all right.

Pissing in the Wind: Death of a Cliche Title

So, Arthur Miller is dead, huh? Too bad. The Crucible was good, and I thought Death of a Salesman was pretty interesting. I liked the part when Biff went postal and started shooting SCUD missiles at his office building from atop a grassy knoll, screaming "Say 'ello to my little friend" with guns ablaze, and his shirt torn open, exposing a "Thug Life" tattoo across his chiseled abs. Good times, good times.

I'm going to level with you here: I know very little about Arthur Miller and his work. To be perfectly honest, when news reports went out saying "Arthur Miller is dead," my first reaction was, "Arthur Miller was alive?" And apparently he was, and apparently now, he's not. Frankly, I was more concerned with the death of Rick James than of Arthur Miller. Not to mention ODB. At least with those you were just waiting for the autopsies of those drug-bloated corpses.

This might strike some readers of The Enfranchised as strange, since the writings and topics of choice for this blog tend to be literary, with the founders' scientific backgrounds sometimes creeping through. But since I consider myself more of a houseguest than a tenant (think the Kato Kalin of blogs), I'm sort of the odd man out. This is especially so with regards to the overall voice at The Enfranchised. As the name might suggest, the blog could be thought of as the voice of an oppressed majority. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the postings never really reflect that. And in my opinion, that's a good thing. I'd much rather read a collection of rants and articles not tied down to any ideology or common voice for that matter. And in my own, liberal-guiltish way, I find the latter preferable. Granted I'm a white male, from a middle-class suburb, educated in a New England private school, but that's about all I have in common with WASP culture. Plus I'm a gay, communist amputee. Power to the people.

But enough disclaimers. Baron von Foster touched on an interesting topic in his turn at upwind urination, namely, the role of blogs. Thanks to the internet--and kudos to Al Gore--it seems that everyone has a blog nowadays. Dan & Dan have one (of which I am a proud contributor). I have one. Even the Prime Minister of Ukraine has a freaking blog. In short, blogs are going the way of assholes--everyone has them, and mostly they smell like shit.

I could be an aspiring author and write the wittiest, most well-written (or is it best written? Obviously this is hypothetical) essays in my blog and no one could read it. I could write salacious lies about elected officials and world leaders, and I bet people would probably read it then (and believe it). For example: the Pope is actually dead. Has been for years. It's like Weekend at Bernie's in the Vatican. That, and Dick Cheney is gay.

Someone searching in google for "Dick Cheney gay" or "Pope Bernie" might come to this blog, and if I wrote an entire expose about Cheney's gayness, or the Pope's deadness, who's to stop me? My editor? My sponsors? My (laugh) sense of decency? It's sort of a double edged sword: freedom of speech, but a little too free... Or as my gay friend Dick Cheney might say when speaking Pope-like zombie-talk, "must...stifle...dissent..."

So in an internet full of blogs, how do you get your readers? Put metaphorically, if a blog falls in the forest, would anyone hear it? Put succinctly, who the fuck cares what I/we write? And should we even care if anyone does? Hence, comrade Bentley's google ad about Arthur Miller.

Maybe some people were directed to this blog and found it interesting. Perhaps more found it ungrammatical drivel and puked on their keyboards. (me no see why). Probably, a lot are wondering about the necessity for all this self-indulgent introspection. Either way, I'd hope no one would come here expecting a blog devoted entirely to Arthur Miller. What would that be like anyway? "Update: he's still dead." "Further update: Arthur Miller rocks!" "Breaking news: his fingernails have grown. Arthur Miller lives!"

So basically what I'm saying is that Arthur Miller is dead, and unless some literary psycho wants to go papal on his ass, he's going to stay that way. You should probably go read one of his plays, that way you can commiserate with the cultured community, and talk about the great scene where John Proctor throws miniature crucibles at the undead to stop them from eating all of Salem's candy. And thus, Halloween was born.

Pissing Into the Wind: Pissing Into the Wind

This post is a lot like Dan's dear old mum: late, lackluster and notable mainly for its holes.

Ok, so that analogy was a bit off-sides. Truth is, I don't know how the shit to make this topic funny.

I told Dan as much when he posted it the other day.

"But, its about death!" he said. "Death is ALWAYS funny."

"No, Dan." I says to him. "Its about advertising. And advertising is the least funny thing in this and all reasonably promixate universes."

"Shit, I dunno." He scratched his head. "Imagine.....product placement on tombstones."

There is, of course, no accounting for taste.

But what's worse is that, in the absence of humor, I don't even know how to make this post interesting. It seems to me this is a non-issue. Should we be profitting from the death of a great artist and social critic, even a much-loved one? Why, no, Yoko, we shouldn't. But it doesn't seem to me that we here at The Enfranchised ARE profitting from it. We are not, for instance, selling "Death of a Playwright" t-shirts or commemorative porcelein "Cruci-bowls". Nor are we claiming to be in receipt of a homemade, super-steamy, uncensored Miller-Monroe Technicolor (R) Moving Picture, coming soon (for a fee) to your 16mm Reel-to-Reel.

No, sir. If we living white men are guilty of any crime against that dead one, it's that we deign think we've got something meaningful to add to the discourse on his demise. We've perhaps gotten it into our heads that the world, or at least the digital world, gives half-a-kilobyte about what we have to say. So we use our meagre pull with the Oracle at Google to siphon away a few well-intentioned furrowed-brow intellectual types from the standard fare at salon-dot-com and The Times, to our little den of triumphant WASPism, where we offer up only the best in self-congratulatory, obscure references (Jude the Obscure-obscure, not The Mayor of Casterbridge-obscure; after-all, we want to make you feel as snarky and clever as us). But if class-solidarity through the public-exhibition of exclusivist, jargon-filled rhetoric is a crime, then surely Michael Moore, my "Postcolonial Studies" professor, and the editorial staff at The New Yorker should all be in jail.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly so good a writer as Dan would like to think that I like to think I am. In fact, I'm fairly sure I misused "gotten" in the previous paragraph, but I don't really know because I'm just THAT mediocre. So, I'm not too worried about the repercussions of our nontroversial choice to market to the "reader-of-armchair-punditry-about-recently-deceased-playwrights" crowd. Fact is, even with the extra Google hits, we're just a blog in a sea of blogs, no different from this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one or this one. And what's more, we don't even have an interesting "underrepresented" or "repressed" or "marginalized" take on things. As the name of the blog suggests, the only thing marginal about us is our talent.

Therefore I say fret not, Fearless Moderator. I doubt you'll have to wring your hands or consult your scriptures too much over this one. I think its cute and endearing that you see our convoluted method for getting the little boxes of numbers at the bottom of our page to change more frequently as presenting an ethical dilemma about the price of exposure. But if you're really convinced that our b-musings here are going to make any of us famous, well, I've got a real estate investment I'd like to talk to you about.

You're right about one thing, though. And that's that, once we've hooked the reader, once she's come this far, she can't stop. That's right, I'm talking to you. Don't even THINK about not reading the rest of this post.

Every. Last. Word. Of it.

Pissing In The Wind: Autopsy of a Post-Mortem of an Obituary inside an Enigma

If you were reading this website 4 days ago, odds are I knew you. Today, however, odds are you clicked on an ad from google.com. You're looking for information about Arthur Miller. I followed reports of his death here. But we here at the Enfranchised have a broader vision. Part of that vision is, once a week, to argue.

And so, the question before us today is, should another part of that vision be opportunistic advertising? Bidding on keywords we tangentially discuss at best to lure readers into our spider's web of a site? Is it all right to commemorate one of our fallen comrades by using his demise as our foot in the door?

Of course, we're not alone. David Mamet banged out a tribute, just in case you forgot that he had not disappeared after Glengarry Glen Ross. (obligatory one-liner: I watched the network TV version of GGGR last night. It ran 15 minutes) Our ad was placed on google.com within 50 minutes of the news breaking, but since then such reputable establishments as NPR and the New York Times have outbid us for the traffic of mourners. So, we're at least in good company in our blatant grab at readership through morbidity.

So, commentators, tell me, is this how we want to become famous? Grabbing the eyeballs of innocent travelers wishing to console their grief over tragedy with information? Or are we, in
fact, just that desperate?

Also, in a well-structured 5-paragraph essay, choose any character from The Crucible and discuss what, if any, mistakes they make in the context of honesty, history, and the Protestant Work Ethic.